AdaCamp Montreal

It’s been a long time since AdaCamp Melbourne, so I was looking forward to seeing how AdaCamp has changed since 2012. AdaCamp Montreal was lovely! It still had the supportive community feel that I’d enjoyed about AdaCamp Melbourne, but running over two days instead of one felt more relaxed, and it’s clear that the experience of running previous AdaCamps is being reflected in the organisational details.

The event started with an induction that laid out diversity and inclusivity policies, including appropriate language and content, accessibility around the space, all genders bathrooms, and name badges with preferred pronouns and colour-and-stripe codes for photography guides. It was also reassuring to see these policies followed up with reminders where necessary. (I’m on the advisory board for the Ada Initiative, but I’m not directly involved in the running of AdaCamps or discussion around them, so all of this was a pleasant discovery.)

Photo by @EvoNeuro

AdaCamp is an unconference, which means that the sessions that are going to run aren’t fixed ahead of time. I liked the structure for setting up sessions: people proposed talks, briefly explained them, and then organisers put them into the available slots based on how loud the audience response was, consolidating sessions in a few places. Each session also came with role cards (facilitator, gatekeeper, timekeeper, notekeeper) to help them run more smoothly.

Image from edna_million on Flickr

On the first day I started off in a session on zines and independent publishing. Participants came from very different backgrounds: some weren’t sure what a zine was, others had been making and swapping zines in high school, and there were also a few people with experience publishing on other independent platforms. I liked the exploration of the history of zines (apparently in the UK zines were not just a punk/queer/feminist thing but also a really big part of the football fanclub scene?), and discussion of zine-like digital stuff (zines that used to come on diskettes, online zines, zines on USB sticks, podcasts). Recommendations to check out:

I also went to a session on the gender gap on Wikipedia. One speaker* noted that a lot of the claims made about women (and other marginalised groups, but there’s little data available beyond gender) online are demonstrably not true of online fan communities. For example, claims that, “women don’t have time to participate in Wikipedia”, “women aren’t interested in producing content for the Web”, or even “women think Wikipedia is too trivial and focus on more serious pursuits” are all undermined by the huge participation of women in fan communities. So what’s the difference between fandom and Wikipedia that leads to that reversal? Part of it is that the culture around fandom is so much more encouraging: when you contribute, you usually get a lot of positive feedback and only get negative feedback if you solicit it. So how can we make Wikipedia (or spaces outside of Wikipedia, but contributing to it) more like that?

After lunch, and lightning talks (which I coordinated slightly clumsily, it being my first effort at it), I helped facilitate a shared session on anarchist approaches to feminism, and working collectively/cooperatively in tech (and other ‘open stuff’). There’s a longer, separate post on this for people chasing up further resources, and I’m hoping my co-presenter will also post something about her experience working in a tech workers’ co-op.

‘Dirty Sexist Ad’ by Toban B.

On the second day, I started by going to a talk on fundraising by Mary Gardiner, one of the Ada Initiative co-founders. It’s generally useful to me to know more about how the Ada Initiative approaches fundraising, but I’m also curious about different approaches to sustaining our lives and work. Fundraising has its limits, but so does everything else. There was a lot of good advice from Mary and other participants, but the strongest recurring piece of advice seemed to be: don’t ever do t-shirts. Really, no t-shirts.

The final session I went to was on editing Wikipedia and the Geek Feminism wiki. There were a lot of good ideas for where to start: for Wikipedia, finding stubs can help expand on topics that are already considered ‘notable’ but clearly need work. Countering the bias in Wikipedia can also be done by paying attention to the sources you draw on: where possible, it’s helpful to cite academic (or otherwise reputable sources) by women, people of colour, and people from marginalised groups discussed in articles (for example, an article on trans issues should cite trans authors).

The Geek Feminism wiki also has plenty of stubs, and a handy community portal to help people start contributing. The editorial guidelines are quite different from Wikipedia’s: the site is actively feminism in its perspective and approach (in contrast to the ‘neutral’ point of view Wikipedia attempts to build), and as such allows primary research and anecdotal evidence.

Wall of compliments, by @SVMelton

These notes are missing a lot: the detailed discussion in sessions, conversations I had over lunch, new things I’m thinking and planning, processes that worked well and that I’ll end up re-using. There were so many interesting and important sessions I didn’t get a chance to check out, including the Cryptoparty and the session on dealing with online harassment. I’m sure there’ll be plenty more notes and blog posts (and perhaps a section on the Geek Feminism wiki) around the place over coming days, happily.

For those looking for more information, check out the #AdaCamp hashtag on Twitter. There’ll also be a report coming out from the Ada Initiative in a while.